Shakespeare Wrote Insightfully About Women. That Doesn’t Mean He Was One.
To speculate about the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays is to pursue conspiracy theories—and in this case, to obscure a sea change in how directors, actors, and audiences understand his depiction of women.
Editor’s Note: This article is one in a series of responses to Elizabeth Winkler’s article, “Was Shakespeare a Woman?,” in the June issue of the magazine.
For years, fantasists who peddle the fiction that Shakespeare didn’t write the plays attributed to him have failed to get to backdate doubts about his authorship. Wikipedia refuses to do so because scholars have demonstrated that two and a half centuries passed before this theory was first proposed, in the mid–19th century. That’s a fact. You can imagine the doubters’ joy when discovering that Elizabeth Winkler managed to publish this falsehood in the pages of , confidently assuring her readers that “doubts about whether William Shakespeare … really wrote the works attributed to him
